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This study examines psychological theorizing about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on women's sexuality. I argue that the psychological definitions of, and treatments for, `sexual dysfunction' are instruments of oppression designed to enforce heterosexuality and obscure feminist questions about the links between sexual violence and `normal' sexual relationships. We urgently need to reclaim a radical feminist way of understanding experience that rejects compulsory heterosexuality and demands social revolution, instead of simply promoting individual adaptation.

AbstractThis article builds on and develops the emerging bioethics literature on the 'window of opportunity' for allowing death by withholding or withdrawing treatment. Our findings are drawn from in‐depth interviews with 26 people (from 14 different families) with severely brain injured relatives. These interviews were specifically selected from a larger study on the basis of interviewees' reports that their relatives would not have wanted to be kept alive in their current condition (e.g. in vegetative or minimally conscious states). Our analysis tracks the decision‐making processes that have led to the situation in which life‐sustaining treatments continue to be delivered to these patients – maintaining them in a state that some families describe as a 'fate worse than death'. We show how the medico‐legal 'window of opportunity' for allowing the patient to die structures family experience and fails to deliver optimal outcomes for patients. We end with some suggestions for change.

Which risks attract mass media attention? When and why do particular threats become headline news? Using three diverse case studies, this article charts the rise and fall of risk crises and draws on interviews with journalists and their sources to identify the key factors affecting these processes. We demonstrate how source competition, journalists' training, `newsworthiness', news momentum and the organization of news beats and media outlets encourage certain risks to be highlighted at particular times, but encourage other risk debates to be entirely overlooked. We argue that standard accounts of news production processes fail adequately to account for the media profile of `risk' unless they are integrated with an understanding of `cultural givens', changes over time, occasional suspensions of `normal' journalistic practice and consideration of the particular conditions which come into play on `risk reporting'. Similarly, our research suggests that theoretical accounts of `risk society' often oversimplify the media's role. Far from being eager reporters of risk, the press and TV news are ill adapted for sustaining high level coverage of long-term threats. Media interest is rarely maintained in the face of ongoing uncertainty and official silence or inaction. In spite of this, the media can serve as one avenue for public information and political/policy leverage for those who believe that risk assessment is `too important to leave to the experts'. However, the media cannot be assumed to be automatic allies in the `democratization of risk', and the success of some unofficial sources in attracting media attention should not be celebrated uncritically.